


Past Tense

by Ark



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, M/M, Post-Serum, Pre-Serum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 19:07:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1480756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ark/pseuds/Ark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers is falling from the sky.</p><p>His brief life flashes before his eyes:</p>
            </blockquote>





	Past Tense

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into English available: [past tense 过去时](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8141323) by [inasmiles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inasmiles/pseuds/inasmiles)



> Thanks to the lovely [stillwanderingflame](http://stillwanderingflame.tumblr.com) for betaing me better. Come cry with us on [tumblr](http://et-in-arkadia.tumblr.com). We cry a lot.

Steve Rogers is falling from the sky.

His brief life flashes before his eyes:

He is six years old, skinny and stunted, always the last to be picked, the first to be picked on. One day when he is down in the dirt, curled up, the promised kick never lands. He opens his eyes, and another boy has his bully in a headlock. 

“I’m Bucky,” says the boy, after the attacker is dispatched. He has a messy head of brown curls and a gap-toothed grin. 

“Steven.” He squeaks it out. He’s dazzled by his luck. Rescued. He never knew such a reprieve to be possible. Kicking ends in kicks, until today.

“Wanna be friends, Steve?” Bucky asks. He doesn’t seem to notice the diminutive. He opens his paper lunch sack and offers half a peanut butter sandwich. Jelly is expensive.

“Sure,” says Steve. It’s easy when you’re six. They share Steve’s apple.

They are six-and-a-half when they are told that boys don’t hold hands.

Steve is eight years old and in love with his best friend. No one will ever convince him that he is not. Adults forget that children feel as profoundly, only with more purity and less impunity. 

All he knows is that only Bucky matters. Grown-ups have already proven duplicitous, his mother fading in and out of attention, teachers turning a blind eye to the cruelty of their charges. Some adults are worse than classmates, calling Steve names he never repeats and never forgets. 

If Bucky knew, he’d stomp on shiny shoes and slip salt into the teachers’ room coffeepot. So Steve doesn’t tell. Only Bucky matters, and Bucky gets into enough trouble getting Steve out of scrapes.

He is ten years old when Bucky is the star of the school Christmas pageant, cast as a singing Joseph. Steve’s role is to help the children playing animals change into angels for the second act. He knows every word of the play by heart, and whenever Mary speaks, he mouths the lines.

Steve is twelve and his mother is sick for the first time. He stays over at Bucky’s, first for a few days, then most nights. They drag out the couch cushions and lay them close to Bucky’s bed, so that they can talk after dark without being caught. 

One night Steve cries, his frail shoulders hunched, and Bucky doesn’t say anything at all. He moves over on his narrow cot, making it creak, and Steve crawls in beside him. Only with Bucky’s even breathing close by can he sleep again. Bucky’s breath never rattles in his chest. 

Steve is fourteen and Bucky has had his first kiss. Bucky’s analysis is succinct. “Nothing special, I’ll say that. I don’t know what the other fellas are goin’ on about,” he tells Steve. “It was all wet.”

Steve wants to drop to the floor and curl up like he has been kicked, but he makes himself listen, nod supportively. “Seems overrated, if you ask me,” he says, though no one does but Bucky.

Bucky frowns. “Maybe it was my fault,” he says, frustrated when he does not easily master a challenge. Lately he has been challenging the high school’s dress code, and his chestnut hair curls down over the nape of his neck. “I don’t have any practice.”

They share a glance -- not ashamed, not that, only circumspect. Neither wants to suggest it first. Until Steve swallows, and gathers his ragged courage, and offers what’s been on his mind since everyone around them started kissing. “We could try it out. Get better without the girls knowing.”

“Yeah?” Bucky flushes, looks relieved. “You mean it?”

“Sure,” says Steve. Nothing is easy when you’re fourteen, but they manage. 

Steve is sixteen and grown nervous about the kissing. It’s other people that induce it. He’s not worried about himself. 

“Myrna Thomas told half of chemistry you were a fairy because you turned her down,” Steve reports, his throat tight, his fists still clenched from unthrown punches. He knows he’s babbling, but he needs to transmit the danger that they’re in; Bucky’s face is too calm, too cool. “Then later in the locker room, Davey Benson told anyone who’d listen that he knew for sure that we were queers, that he’d seen us in the park--”

“Huh,” says Bucky, hanging up his jacket on its peg, “most observant Davey’s ever been in his damned life. Doesn’t matter. Everyone knows he’s got a mouth a mile wide, and that Myrna’s been after me since seventh grade.”

“But--”

“I said it doesn’t matter, Steve.” Bucky paces forward, across his bedroom, marching over the cushions on the floor, which have been increasingly abandoned as of late. It is lucky that Steve is so slight, that they can fit curled up on the cot after their fumbling, exhilarating explorations in the dark. “Ain’t we queer, anyway?”

“Bucky--”

“Ain’t we?” Bucky slides his arms around Steve, unabashed. Puts his hands into Steve’s hair, his lips nearly to Steve’s lips. 

“Sure,” says Steve. It’s easy when you’re sixteen and you don’t know how the world will view you, only your peers, and you don’t care about any of them save one. 

They are sixteen-and-a-half when a man from the neighborhood is put into the hospital for the rumor that the cousin who lives with him is not his cousin. For a wretched season there are no sleepovers, and Bucky pals around with Davey Benson at football practice.

Steve is eighteen when his mother dies. It isn’t a surprise. People always ask that: was it a surprise? As though it’s better if you can see death approaching, as though it’s happier to watch a life wither and suffer and drain away rather than be suddenly snuffed out. 

“No, it was expected,” Steve will answer, the words rising to his throat through the hollowed-out cave of his chest. That is what it feels like when someone you love dies: as though a shovel has been dug into your ribcage instead of the earth, as though you are the one buried. 

Sound and light and colors fade. People talk and you cannot hear them, try to touch you and you fade away. Death lingers in the living much longer than the dead.

Bucky finds him after the cemetery, corners him outside the flat that is now only Steve’s, silent rooms mostly bare, and also full-up with his mother. 

Inside Steve will see the blue dishtowels she bought to brighten the drab kitchen, the hand-knit afghan cast across the threadbare couch, the messy sidetable of medicines and tinctures he hadn’t touched while she was prone in the ward, since straightening up implied a lack of return. 

Steve will see all of these things and more if he goes inside, so he doesn’t. 

Bucky has got a new suit for the occasion, and it fits him like a glove. The fabric is good stuff but too dark; it will always be funereal. Bucky’s been saving up for his graduation outfit a long time, but he gets the suit instead. His brown hair, usually worn wild, has been given a solemn slicking, flattened to respectful. Steve would be touched if he could feel anything but numb.

While Steve stands staring, Bucky makes the case that he needn’t go in at all; Bucky’s room is back in the offering. Bucky frames it like his parents are in on the idea, like they’ll hold their peace and not look askance to see the old cushions dragged out. 

After they turned seventeen, Bucky’s dad started saying that it wasn’t quite natural for boys to still be getting on like they were. Shouldn’t they be out with girls? Bucky’s room became a closed-off space, barricaded. They could study together but they couldn’t sleep. For the other things they did they started going to the parks and to the dockyards after dark and sometimes, stupidly, indulged in alleyways where anyone might see. 

They discovered the first dance-hall where there were others like them. They stayed busy, Bucky with senior football season and Steve investigating city college options at his favorite teacher’s urging. Life was manageable before his mom died and then nothing is.

He is eighteen and more alone than he has ever been when Bucky tells him that he’s not. Bucky grips Steve’s slender shoulder, and looks into his eyes, and swears he’ll be in it ‘til the end of the line. 

Many of their classmates are getting engaged or flat-out married. They have this exchange instead.

Steve makes a joke about how they don’t have enough money to go anywhere in particular, let alone all the way to the end; but he throws his arms around Bucky’s neck and he doesn’t let go. Bucky has fished the key from its hiding place under the brick. He lets them in. 

Then he lifts Steve, unprotesting, into his arms, and carries him through the flat. Bucky doesn’t light any lights. The towels and the quilt and the table are passed. Bucky carries Steve into his room, kicks the door shut. 

He puts Steve down on the rickety twin bed. The whole bedroom is tiny; Steve has only ever been grateful for his slight frame when considering his scant floorspace. The room is a box with the bed and an old dresser, a cracked wash-basin, a comb. No mirror. Without Steve’s drawings plastered on every wall it would be a coffin. 

Instead it is a chamber displaced, a doorway to other places. Dozens of fantastical landscapes suggest the observer might go elsewhere. More familiar scenes of Brooklyn are wreathed in light and shadow so that the bridges are misty ramparts, and the factories towering castles. 

Bucky lays them down fully clothed, in their mourning dress. They lie tangled up together. They don’t have to talk. They are always communicating. Later Bucky sleeps and snores and Steve listens, Bucky’s racket glorious at keeping the silence at bay. 

In the morning Steve pulls Bucky on top of him and tells Bucky to fuck him. Haven’t they waited long enough? What are they waiting for? Time is indifferent. Steve isn’t. Bucky isn’t. 

Still, Bucky makes sure, takes a long while about it. Won’t rush even when Steve says he shouldn’t be gentle. Takes too long, makes it too good. Steve hoped for distraction, for escape, even for pain; but Bucky brings them together carefully, like he’s thought a lot about it, has it all planned out. 

He won’t stop kissing Steve, and touching him all over, waiting for Steve to be right there with him before he advances. Bucky keeps his eyes open and on Steve’s, and when Steve cries out Bucky bends to soothe his mouth.

Bucky’s face above him is without barrier, his pupils blown black, windows to his honest soul. “Steve, Steve. You feel--”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “Yeah, I do.”

“Whoa,” says Bucky, much later. “Holy shit. You think we could try that again?”

“Sure,” says Steve. It’s easy when you’re eighteen and you want to escape from everything you know. Your body is complicit, at least.

Steve is twenty and life takes on a shape he likes. He no longer feels buffeted by forces he can’t control. The harsh instructors and fellow students who were never his fellows are gone. Freedom is heady. No one tells you that after you graduate from the system, no one gives a damn. Steve has never been happier.

From the money they scrape together they share a tiny apartment all their own. The whole space is smaller than Bucky’s childhood room. It’s just big enough. They have their books and furniture bought from stoop-sales, their meagre childhood possessions unboxed. 

Steve’s art is everywhere for decoration. The bed is the singular indulgence: big enough for two, but not so large as to sleep far apart. 

Steve’s twentieth year is enchanted. He draws no distant kingdoms, only Bucky: Bucky overcooking their dinner on the stove, Bucky after a hard day down at the docks, splayed across the couch with his shirt off. 

Bucky posed by the window, head in hand, trying to look like fine art, on a day when Steve asked if he minded being sketched. Bucky never minds anything.

Steve is twenty-two and all of Brooklyn is his stomping-grounds. Everything would be all right, save for the war. 

He and Bucky have a diner where they eat, a bar that hails them with extra-large whiskeys. Their jobs during the day are trying but steady. At night they fuck furiously, or slow and languid, and no one is the wiser. Until Bucky starts talking about the war, too.

Steve is twenty-two and he wants to go into battle alongside everyone he knows, wants to help save the world. Most of all, he doesn’t want Bucky to go without him. Steve tries every tactic, but none yield gain. Bucky passes the threshold into war easily; Steve is left behind.

It isn’t easy when you’re twenty-two and weigh forty pounds less than your most lightweight compatriots. The first doctors to examine Steve are kind but firm. The second are sad, wishing for able bodies, knowing that they must pass over Steve’s. The third are enraged at him for wasting time. 

Steve goes home and watches Bucky try on his new uniform in the mirror they bought together. 

“Who wouldn’t want to look at you?” Bucky had argued, bringing the ungainly piece home to rest by their bed. Steve knows who. He turns his eyes away from the glass, from the body that betrays his ambitions. He holds Bucky down that night but can’t keep him. The rushing tide washes over them and takes Bucky.

He is twenty-two when Bucky ships out. There is nothing much to look forward to save Bucky’s return. Steve looks at Bucky’s hand beside his when they walk to the big ship beside the other couples, and he shakes Bucky’s hand at plank-bridge, letting go. Bucky salutes.

Their apartment is silent and full of ghosts. 

He is twenty-two when Project Rebirth accepts him. Steve is transformed. 

He is still alone, surrounded by too many people invested in his affairs. It will become a pattern.

Steve is twenty-three when Captain America is sent to Europe. He is twenty-three when Nazis grovel at his feet. He is twenty-three when he looks straight-on at the worst horrors mankind can create. 

Then he is twenty-three with a map in his pocket to where Bucky was last seen alive, and a compass with a tireless dame pasted in its shell to remind Steve to be smart. 

Steve is twenty-three when Bucky is returned. He finds Bucky strapped down and liberates him. At the time, Bucky can only recite his name and number, which is enough.

Soon Bucky faces him across a fiery bridge, and screams that he will not leave without Steve. Steve crosses the bridge, kisses the mouth like he has been dreaming about. Bucky has not been dreaming. 

Steve turns twenty-four during the second-best time of his life. It isn’t Brooklyn, it’s the trenches of god-knows-where, but it’s good. Near every night, Bucky is in his tent, or he crawls into Bucky’s, and no one is the wiser. Oh, they’re wise; but no one intercedes. Captain America is the most on-focus he’s ever been. If he shares his best friend’s tent, what is that to the Allies? What is it to Hydra?

Little, compared to the damage that he can inflict, Steve is certain. With Bucky where he should be, as advance scout and backup, Steve’s right arm, they tear the continent apart. They rewrite every map.

Steve is twenty-four when Bucky picks up his shield and dies for him. Steve has few illusions about it. Bucky goes for the shield, thinking that he can use it to protect Steve; but he isn’t strong enough to hold it. The force of bullets collides with the vibranium and blows him backwards, out of the rushing train in the freezing light. It’s the shield that does it.

Bucky clings to a railing that sags and gives, and he shouts for Steve. Steve reaches a half-breath too late. The metal gives way beneath Bucky, and he grabs at Steve and at nothing and is gone. 

Steve holds to the train, puts his head against the steel. Steel doesn’t stifle sobs. At twenty-four, Steve watches the life he wanted lost. The world is colorless and gray and tastes of metal. His subsequent days are numbered, blurred. He looks for missions that will relieve him.

At twenty-four, Steve goes under the ice.

Steve is twenty-four when he wakes up seventy years in the future. His dreams then are good; he does not want to wake up. The world is different, but still ruled by the wrong interests in different clothes. 

He joins a team of people equally invested in setting things right and having a little privacy. He helps save the city of his birth, but he does not stay. Every street is known and unknown, and the alleys are full of shadows only he can see.

Steve is twenty-six and he lives in the nation’s capital. It keeps him closer to the front lines. He has a flat of his own that overlooks cherry blossoms. Natasha has been assigned to oversee his personal growth. If he goes with her to one nightclub per month and entertains her catalogue of potential dates she leaves him alone, doesn’t ever really press. He plays records to fill up the silence.

Steve is twenty-six and has made a real good friend named Sam Wilson. Natasha knows him well enough to know his neighbors. Life is settling in, until Nick Fury pays a house call.

Fury’s attacker snatches Steve’s shield out of the air as though it is the easiest thing in the world. As though Steve could never harm him. 

Steve is twenty-six and Bucky Barnes is alive and isn’t. 

It’s the best and worst thing that ever happens to him, all at once. By comparison the super-serum was a simple medical procedure. His most profound wish comes true and is invalidated in the same breath. Bucky knows him and does not know him; Steve sees the war behind his eyes.

Steve Rogers is twenty-six and falling from the sky.

He’s glad he saw it through to the end. He would have survived a controlled dive into the river, but that would have meant leaving Bucky pinned to the failing ship. It was worth it, all of the pain, to see the Winter Soldier’s face change when Steve spoke the words they swore on. It was worth it to watch Bucky surface on a foreign face, and to feel his hands draw back. 

As Steve falls he feels peaceful. He sees Bucky from six through to twenty-six, and Bucky is the last sight he sees.

He goes under the water.

It doesn’t take him quickly, like the ice had. Any other man would have hit and broken in half, but Steve can feel the liquid like concrete encasing him. Han Solo frozen in carbonite, he thinks wildly. He’s made it to _The Empire Strikes Back_ in his notebook. He doesn’t know what happens to Han.

If he opens his mouth to laugh, he will die. But he can’t move. His limbs are lead. He has too much lead in him, and the last few leaden punches knocked him senseless. Maybe that’s what he’s afraid of, what he doesn’t want to think about. 

Doesn’t want his last thought to be that maybe he was hit hard enough to imagine it was Bucky. Maybe the Winter Soldier had pulled back in disdain, readying a death-blow, only Steve fell instead.

Impacts in the water nearby. Then there are more hits, and he is jerked against the current by the pressure. Steve opens his eyes and watches the helicarrier break apart in abstract, his eyes forced open. The airship is a hazy rose-red in the clouds above the river. The sky is falling.

He is twenty-six at the end. It is an honorable death, having defeated tyranny and saved countless civilians. Captain America wouldn’t have asked for more than this. Steve Rogers got it anyway, and in the end he chooses to believe that it’s true: that for a moment it was Bucky above him, looking down at Steve and knowing him. 

It started when they were kids and Bucky leaned down to help Steve to his feet in the schoolyard. When they were men, Bucky used to gaze at him as he held himself over Steve -- every time with a kind of wide-eyed wonder that they had found and kept this. Every time. 

After Steve became Captain America, Bucky’s gaze changed; there was a newfound respect that was born with Steve’s new shape. Instead of jealousy Bucky admired what he had done, though he ribbed him endlessly to keep Steve level-headed, and rode him hard to remind him of their roots. Steve could easily overpower him now but Bucky came out atop more often than not, staring down at Steve with the same face as the Winter Soldier.

Steve will be twenty-six when he dies. People will pass his gravestone and see the dates, and think an old man is buried there. Under the water, Steve feels old. His air was shocked out of him in the fall and is almost all gone. He should take a breath.

A clamp seizes on his shoulder. Sharp edge of metal. S.H.I.E.L.D. has him. No. A piece of the carrier has him pierced. No.

A hand grips onto him. Closes around him and doesn’t let go. A shadow swims.

Water turns from concrete to sludge to mud to liquid filth and then into the air on fire. The air is burning but Steve doesn’t care. He breathes it in, great gulping mouthfuls, expelling equal amounts of water, the process helped along by firm slaps to his upper back as mechanical as the arm that holds him up. 

What did Bucky see, Steve wonders, as he dove after him through the sky? 

Steve breathes, just barely, and Bucky helps him. It’s easy to survive when you’re twenty-six and the world’s most fearsome assassin has compromised the mission on your account. 

Because you know him better than anyone ever will, because he knows the same about you. Because a few spare years and a lifetime ago you swore that this was it, then proved it. Sworn oaths cannot be broken without consent. Some actions cannot be undone. 

Memory is fickle, flickers. They could be anywhere in time. Bucky saves Steve; it is an old story.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Past Tense](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3334415) by [watery_weasel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/watery_weasel/pseuds/watery_weasel)




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